John F. Kennedy Equivocated

Nikolas K. Gvosdev & Dimitri K. Simes

It was stirring rhetoric to declare, “we shall pay any price, bear any burden … in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty”—but it wasn’t long until the Bay of Pigs fiasco demonstrated that wasn’t so. Americans have made it abundantly clear that their enthusiasm for democracy promotion abroad is intimately connected to the perceived expense in blood and treasure.

This nation sorely needs a serious debate about both the means and ends of U.S. foreign policy, especially with regard to the Middle East. Instead, caricatures often substitute for facts and personal attacks are levied in place of rational analysis. A recent column by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, responding to Brent Scowcroft’s criticisms of the Bush Administration, is a good example.

Reading Krauthammer, you might believe that General Scowcroft was a cheerleader for Saddam Hussein like British MP George Galloway, instead of one of the principal architects of the highly successful first Gulf War that drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, permanently crippled his regime and enhanced U.S. global leadership.

Reasonable people can debate whether the first Bush team’s assessment that the potential costs of going “on to Baghdad” outweighed the benefits. But concerns about America’s ability to single-handedly take on the burden of nation-building in an Arab nation outside the UN mandate that the U.S. itself had orchestrated to assemble the coalition were serious considerations and to dismiss them as a desire to continue “with a ruthlessly efficient dictatorship” is profoundly misleading.

Krauthammer is right that the realists value stability. What sane person wouldn’t—particularly with our experience with failed states providing a fertile ground for terrorism with nuclear ambitions? And Krauthammer, in the past, defended this point quite clearly. Eighteen years ago, he thundered, “You do not blindly threaten or weaken regimes where there exists no democratic alternative” and he castigated the “touching and grandiose belief” that it was “in the power of the United States to redeem the politics of benighted lands by means of well-intentioned resolutions of the U.S. Congress.”

Krauthammer, among others, has a far more positive assessment of the ability of nascent democratic movements in the Middle East to come to and retain power on their own merits, without plunging the region into a worse state of affairs or one which would negatively affect vital U.S. interests (from access to energy to improving the security of Israel). Scowcroft does not agree with this evaluation--and the faltering of the Rose, Orange, Tulip and Cedar Revolutions demonstrates some of the drawbacks to this style of democracy promotion. The unpleasant facts that Scowcroft and others have called attention to should be openly debated, not shouted down in a torrent of invective.

Realists do not accept the canard that they are uninterested in democracy or human rights—but they reject the assertion that a commitment to liberty is best served by plunging pell-mell into an idealistic crusade with no thought for unintended consequences. Eisenhower, Nixon, and George H.W. Bush were all criticized in their time for “sacrificing” liberty and being too “timid” in advancing freedom, but the policies they endorsed led to the largest (and overwhelmingly peaceful) expansion of democracy in human history.

And herein lies a fundamental point about the conduct of U.S. foreign policy at stake. What realists and, as a matter of fact, every previous American administration, did not want to do was openly proclaim regime change as a primary goal of U.S. policy, especially when the United States is neither willing nor able to manage the international system on its own. In this regard, Krauthammer is wrong about Reagan. As Reagan’s key Russia advisor and later as Ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Jack Matlock writes, putting an end to Communist rule and bringing about the disintegration of the Soviet Union was never Reagan’s objective. Reagan was prepared to speak the truth about the Soviet Union and to boldly challenge Soviet expansionism. But his prime concern was to alter the conduct of Soviet policy, particularly to reduce the threat posed to the United States, rather than to push for Soviet collapse—which is why Reagan reached out to Mikhail Gorbachev, a decision often harshly criticized by those who now imperiously assert that there can be no debate over the merits of current policy vis-à-vis the Middle East.

Krauthammer’s complaint that realists are cold-blooded is a compliment; one would hope that statesmen who make life-and-death decisions about war and peace (as Scowcroft did) do so from a position of cool rationality than hot-tempered emotion. Realists believe that policies have to be judged by results rather than intentions. General Scowcroft was always concerned that policy toward Iraq (and the Middle East in general) was based on a number of erroneous assumptions. He did not shift his position on the war (like so many Washington politicians and pundits) as the casualties and costs mounted. Indeed, wouldn’t the United States be in a much stronger position—certainly fewer Americans would have been killed and less money would be spent—if Krauthammer’s allies in the Bush administration did not substitute passion for sober analysis.

The knives out for Scowcroft demonstrate that the remaining defenders of our current approach toward Iraq have forgotten nothing and learned nothing. But that is not a prescription for an effective foreign policy—and a failed policy can hardly serve to promote American ideals.


Nikolas K. Gvosdev is editor of The National Interest. Dimitri K. Simes is president of The Nixon Center.
 

 Updated 11/7/05